Capítulo II. Definiciones

For the purposes of this law, the following shall be understood by:

a)Access to information: It is the right of a woman to adequate counseling appropriate to her personal situation, through the services, agencies or offices that the competent institutions, both public and private, may make available. Such information shall include the measures contemplated in this law, relating to her protection and security, and the rights and assistance provided for therein, as well as that referring to the place of provision of comprehensive care, emergency, support and recovery services.

b)Private sphere: It comprises domestic, family or trust-based interpersonal relationships within which acts of violence against a woman are committed, when the aggressor is the spouse, former spouse, cohabitant or former cohabitant, with whom the victim has procreated or not, the aggressor is the boyfriend or former boyfriend, or a relative of the victim.

Also included in this sphere shall be relations between the spouse, former spouse, cohabitant or former cohabitant, boyfriend or former boyfriend of a woman with the daughters of the latter.

c)Public sphere: It comprises interpersonal relationships that take place in the community and that include the social, labor, educational, religious sphere or any other type of relationship not included in the private sphere.

d)Comprehensive assistance: A woman victim of violence, her daughters and sons, have the right to social services of care, emergency, support, shelter, as well as recovery. Multidisciplinary care shall especially imply:

1.Medical and psychological care.

2.Social support.

3.Legal follow-up of claims of the rights of a woman.

4.Support for training and labor insertion.

5.Assistance of an interpreter.

e)Femicide: Violent death of a woman, caused in the context of unequal power relations between men and women, in the exercise of gender power against women.

f)Misogyny: Hatred, contempt or underestimation of women for the mere fact of being women.

g)Power relations: Manifestations of control or dominance that lead to the submission of a woman and to discrimination against her.

h)Compensation to the victim: Compensation shall be understood as the set of measures tending to bring the situation of the victim closer to the state in which she would be had the criminal act not occurred.

Compensation must be characterized by its comprehensiveness and comprises, in addition to indemnities of an economic nature, all measures tending to provide the victim with medical, psychological, moral and social reparation.

i)Victim: She is a woman of any age upon whom any type of violence is inflicted.

j)Violence against women: Any action or omission based on belonging to the female sex that results in immediate or subsequent harm, physical, sexual, economic or psychological suffering for the woman, as well as threats of such acts, coercion or arbitrary deprivation of liberty, whether occurring in the public sphere or in the private sphere.

k)Economic violence: Actions or omissions that affect the use, enjoyment, availability or accessibility of a woman to the material property belonging to her by right, by marital bond or de facto union, by capacity or by inheritance, causing her deterioration, damage, transformation, subtraction, destruction, retention or loss of her own material objects or material property or that of the family group, as well as the retention of instruments of work, personal documents, property, securities, rights or economic resources.

l)Physical violence: Aggressive actions in which direct bodily force is used or by means of any object, weapon or substance with which harm, physical suffering, injuries or illness is caused to a woman.

m)Psychological or emotional violence: Actions that may produce harm or psychological or emotional suffering to a woman, to her daughters or to her sons, as well as actions, threats or violence against the daughters, sons or other relatives up to the fourth degree of consanguinity and second degree of affinity of the victim, in both cases with the object of intimidating her, undermining her self-esteem or controlling her, who, subjected to that emotional climate, may suffer progressive psychological weakening with depressive conditions.

n)Sexual violence: Actions of physical or psychological violence whose purpose is to violate the sexual liberty and indemnity of a woman, including sexual humiliation, forced prostitution and denial of the right to make use of family planning methods, both natural and artificial, or to adopt protection measures against sexually transmitted diseases.

hers and that of her daughters and sons.